With Aaron Rodgers off the list, Philip Rivers is best QB without a ring

Best active golfer not to have won a major. Play away, Lee Westwood or Steve Stricker or Sergio Garcia.
Best active college basketball coach not to have won a national championship. Hard choice. The menu would include several options. You might choose from grilled John Calipari, broiled Thad Matta, fried Bob Huggins, baked Jamie Dixon, poached Mark Few, or maybe Bo Ryan au jus.
Best NBA team not to have won since Dec. 18. The Cleveland Cavaliers.
Best way to get tickets for Super Bowl XLVI next year. Show up with a ticket to Super Bowl XLV and find out your seat has been condemned or declared off limits of whatever happened in Cowboys Stadium that probably had Roger Goodell sleeping worse Sunday night than Mike Tomlin.
Speaking of Super Bowls and a quarterback who said he slept like a baby the night before the game, you can scratch Aaron Rodgers' name off the list of candidates for another category: Best quarterback never to have won one of these things. Current players only, please, or this discussion would be over faster than you can say Dan Marino.
So who is it? Let's pause first, to appreciate the burden of the position. There are days it must feel as lonely as Tom Hanks on his island in Cast Away. Especially when you lose. It is arguable that this can be the loneliest spot in sports — with the possible exception of a spelling bee participant.
A golfer is on his own, but nobody weighing 320 pounds is trying to rearrange his pelvis. A tennis player is on his own, but he can mishit a dozen times and all it might cost him is a set. A pitcher is on his own, but he's not even expected to finish what he starts. A specialist comes in at crunch time.
The poor quarterback is in the crosshairs from beginning to end, and is the target for defenses and detractors alike. Any loss gets put around his neck like a lei, deserved or not, and the bigger the stage, the larger the lei. Plus, if no one else dumps on him, he'll often do it himself.
"I feel like I let a lot of people down," Ben Roethlisberger said Sunday night, sounding as forlorn as a French horn. "I feel like I let the city of Pittsburgh down."
He needn't have worried. The sports fans of that city ought to be hardened to defeat. The Pirates play there.
Besides, Roethlisberger has already won two championships, so he's not on the list, anyway.
Rodgers was an up-and-coming contender for best ringless quarterback, but not anymore. Not when he's driving around in a new car for being named game MVP.
"No one person has ever won a game by himself," he aw-shucked afterward. That's perfectly true, but there's seldom much conversation about the best left guard never to have won a Super Bowl.
So, which quarterback is it? Certainly, this is not as hard to figure as the most baffling question from this past Super Bowl: why do you have a jet fly-over during the national anthem when the roof is closed and the game is indoors?
Anyway, it's not Donovan McNabb, though he gets bonus points for longevity.
Not Carson Palmer, though he gets dispensation for having to play his entire career so far as a Cincinnati Bengal.
Not Michael Vick, though he's a lot higher on the list than he was 12 months ago.
It's Philip Rivers, and we're calling it a landslide.
He's thrown 135 touchdowns in five seasons as a starter, but never gotten past the conference championship game.
His quarterback ratings the past three seasons have been 101.6, 104.4 and 105.5; numbers suggesting either sound passing, or a really bad fever. The San Diego Chargers have won one postseason game in that time.
It's not that Rivers' biological clock is ticking. He's 29. Then again, he's in the same conference with Roethlisberger and Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, not to mention the Baltimore and New York Jets defenses. His path is never going to have the least resistance.
But Rodgers — with a proper supporting cast — made it, and maybe one day Rivers will, too. Until then, he's Lee Westwood, with a higher handicap.